1.

Game Storage Media

Cartridges
Game cartridges consist of a printed circuit board housed inside of a plastic casing, with a connector allowing the device to
interface with the console. The circuit board can contain a wide variety of components.
All cartridge games contain at the minimum, read only memory with the software written on it. Many cartridges also carry
components that increase the original console's power, such as extra RAM or a coprocessor. Components can also be added to
extend the original hardware's functionality ; this is more common on handheld consoles where the user does not interact with
the game through a separate video game controller.
Cartridges were the first external media to be used with home consoles and remained the most common until 1995 continued
improvements in capacity . Nevertheless, the relatively high manufacturing costs saw them completely replaced by optical
media for home consoles by the early 21st century, although they are still in use in some handheld video game consoles.
Due to the aforementioned capabilities of cartridges such as more memory and coprocessors, those factors make it harder to
reverse engineer consoles to be used on emulators.

Cards
Several consoles such as the Sega Master System and the TurboGrafx-16 have used different types of smart cards as an
external medium. These cards function similar to simple cartridges. Information is stored on a chip that is housed in plastic.
Cards are more compact and simpler than cartridges, though. This makes them cheaper to produce and smaller, but limits what
can be done with them.
Cards cannot hold extra components, and common cartridge techniques like bank switching were impossible to miniaturize
into a card in the late 1980s. Compact Discs reduced much of the need for cards. Optical Discs can hold more information than
cards, and are cheaper to produce. The Nintendo GameCube and the PlayStation 2 use memory cards for storage, but the PS
Vita, Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS are currently the only modern systems to use cards for game distribution. Nintendo has
long used cartridges with their Game Boy line of hand held consoles because of their durability, small size, stability, and low
battery consumption.
Nintendo switched to cards starting with the DS, because advances in memory technology made putting extra memory on the
cartridge unnecessary. The PlayStation Vita uses Sony's own proprietary flash-memory Vita cards as one method of game
distribution.

Magnetic media
Home computers have long used magnetic storage devices. Both tape drives and floppy disk drives were common on early
microcomputers. Their popularity is in large part because a tape drive or disk drive can write to any material it can read.
However, magnetic media is volatile and can be more easily damaged than game cartridges or optical discs.
Among the first consoles to use magnetic media were the Bally Astrocade and APF-M1000, both of which could use cassette
tapes through expansions. In Bally's case, this allowed the console to see new game development even after Bally dropped
support for it. While magnetic media remained limited in use as a primary form of distribution, two popular subsequent consoles
also had expansions available to allow them to use this format. The Star-path Supercharger can load Atari 2600 games from
audio cassettes; Starpath used it to cheaply distribute their own games from 1982 to 1984 and today it is used by many
programmers to test, distribute, and play homebrew software.
The Family Computer Disk System was released by Nintendo in 1985 for the Japanese market. Nintendo sold the disks cheaply
and sold vending machines where customers could have new games written to their disks up to 500 times.

Optical media
In the mid-1990s, various manufacturers shifted to optical media, specifically CD-ROM, for games. Although they were slower at
loading game data than the cartridges available at that time, they were significantly cheaper to manufacture and had a larger
capacity than the existing cartridge technology. Sega released the first CD based gaming system with the Mega-CD in Japan on
December 12, 1991. Commodore followed shortly after with the Amiga-CD32 in September 1993, the first 32-bit game console.
By the early 21st century, all of the major home consoles used optical media, usually DVD-ROM or similar disks, which are
widely replacing CD-ROM for data storage. The PlayStation 3 system uses even higher-capacity Blu-ray optical discs for games
and movies while the Xbox 360 formerly used HD DVDs in the form of an external USB player add-on for movies, before it was
discontinued. However, Microsoft still supports those who bought the accessory.
Posted 4th February 2013 by adam mattis
0

Add a comment

2.
JAN

18

Human Interface Technologies.

Human Interfaces and Technologies by Adam Mattis

The interface technologies created many decades ago were just the beginnings of what would grow and evolve into something
so much larger than what was intended and on a much huger scale than possibly imagined. There are many different types of
interface device that have been created and each are special in their own ways as they all function in ways which can be so
similar yet so entirely different.
Keyboards
Some of the first and most simple interface technologies were simple keyboards. These were developed from the continuation
of the typewriter/teleprinter device created in modern form by Charles and Howard Krum back around 1903-1910. The early
keyboards were large and chunky. Made of very robust plastic. During gameplay, the actual keyboards was assigned to use a
set of certain key. The WASD set up is most popular among gamers. These keys are used to move around in the game world
and the mouse, if connected was used for aiming and shooting. This really depended on what game you were playing.

Gamepad
The game pad is a concept that has been around for a long time. Another name for this device is the "joypad". They are usually
held with both hands, using the palms, fingers and thumbs to control the game. There are usually action buttons and a "D-pad"
or directional pad in which you can select options or control which direction characters move in. The action buttons are usually A
and B buttons. These allow the player to make choices and confirm (A) or abort them (B). Gamepads are the main means of
nearly every console every created and are by far the most popular interface device.

They come in different designs, for example the two latest Xbox 360 game pad is quite large and is designed to already fit to
most players hands due to its size. This controller boasts two analog sticks which are concave shape for extra control as you
can place your thumb inside the small dips they have. It also has a circular shaped D-pad which can also allow diagonal
movement. It has shoulder buttons and four action buttons instead of only two coloured, red, blue, green and yellow. Each
button labelled A,B,X and Y.
It's rival the Playstation 3 or PS3 controllers design is quite different, yet remains extremely similar... It is usually held with both
hands resting in the palms whilst the fingers can make use of the four shoulder buttons it has. The L1, L2, R1 and R2 buttons on
its back can be used for extra actions during gameplay and are very well placed in my view. It also has four action buttons which
are used for command actions during gameplay. Instead of traditional letters or numbers though the PS3 boasts its signature
shape scheme which uses a pink square, a green triangle, a blue cross and a red circle.
The gamepad has gone from a quite simple to becoming very complex very quickly.
Joystick
A joystick is an input device consisting of a stick that pivots on a base and reports its angle or direction to the device it is
controlling. A joystick, also known as the control column, is the principal control device in the cockpit of many civilian and military
aircraft, either as a center stick or side-stick. It often has supplementary switches to control various aspects of the aircraft's
flight.
Joysticks are often used to control video games, and usually have one or more push-buttons whose state can also be read by
the computer. A popular variation of the joystick used on modern video game consoles is the analog stick. Joysticks are also

used for controlling machines such as cranes, trucks, underwater unmanned vehicles, wheelchairs, surveillance cameras and
zero turning radius lawn mowers. Miniature finger-operated joysticks have been adopted as input devices for smaller electronic
equipment such as mobile phones.

Graphics Tablet

Graphics tablets, because of their stylus-based interface and ability to detect some or all of pressure, tilt, and other attributes of
the stylus and its interaction with the tablet, are widely considered to offer a very natural way to create computer graphics,
especially two-dimensional computer graphics. Indeed, many graphics packages can make use of the pressure (and,
sometimes, stylus tilt or rotation) information generated by a tablet, by modifying the brush size, shape, opacity, colour, or other
attributes based on data received from the graphics tablet.
In East Asia, graphics tablets, known as "pen tablets", are widely used in conjunction with input-method editor software to write
Chinese, Japanese, Korean characters (CJK). The technology is popular and inexpensive and offers a method for interacting
with the computer in a more natural way than typing on the keyboard, with the pen tablet supplanting the role of the computer
mouse. Uptake of handwriting recognition among users who use alphabetic scripts has been slower.

Graphics tablets are also very commonly found in the artistic world. Using a pen on a graphics tablet combined with a graphicsediting program, such as Adobe Photoshop, gives artists a lot of precision while creating digital drawings. Photographers can
also find working with a graphics tablet during their post processing can really speed up tasks like creating a detailed layer mask
or dodging and burning.
Educators make use of tablets in classrooms to project handwritten notes or lessons and to allow students to do the same, as
well as providing feedback on student work submitted electronically. Online teachers may also use a tablet for marking student
work, or for live tutorials or lessons, especially where complex visual information or mathematical equations are required.

Touch Screens
A touchscreen is an electronic visual display that the user can control through simple or multi-touch gestures by touching the
screen with one or more fingers. Some touchscreens can also detect objects such as a stylus or ordinary or specially coated
gloves. The user can use the touchscreen to react to what is displayed and to control how it is displayed .
The touchscreen enables the user to interact directly with what is displayed, rather than using a mouse, touchpad, or any other
intermediate device .
Touchscreens are common in devices such as game consoles, all-in-one computers, tablet computers, and smartphones. They
can also be attached to computers or, as terminals, to networks. They also play a prominent role in the design of digital
appliances such as personal digital assistants, satellite navigation devices, mobile phones, and video games.
The popularity of smartphones, tablets, and many types of information appliances is driving the demand and acceptance of
common touchscreens for portable and functional electronics. Touchscreens are popular in the medical field and in heavy
industry, as well as in kiosks such as museum displays or room automation, where keyboard and mouse systems do not allow a
suitably intuitive, rapid, or accurate interaction by the user with the display's content.